The Vipers by Katy Hays - Review

I read The Cloisters by Katy Hays and didn't hate it, but I didn't love it either, so I don't know that I would have given her another chance but then someone chose this for an online book club that I'm in so I bought it on eBay for a few quid and picked it up. And I ended up liking it a lot more! So that's good.

The book is set on the island of Capri so it has the summer gothic feel that I love, where everything is so bright and sunny but there's an undercurrent of threat and something sinister. I loved the setting and could picture it perfectly. 

The main characters are Helen and Lorna. Helen is the daughter of the Lingate family. Her dad and uncle, Richard and Marcus, have a lot of money and are very rich and influential. Thirty years ago, on Capri at the villa they always stay at, Helen's mother Sarah, a famous playwright, fell over a cliff and was killed. The family maintains that it was an accident, but Helen, who was a small child at the time, has always had her doubts. Her father and uncle - and Marcus' wife, Naomi, who drinks too much and takes a lot of prescription drugs - keep her on a really tight leash. She went to college but had a driver and so on; she's  never been free. 

She's determined to make things happen, so she's looped in Lorna, who is Marcus' assistant, to help. Pretty soon in the book the reader knows that Lorna has disappeared, but not exactly why. But as soon as the family arrive on Capri they run into an old friend, who was on the island the day Sarah died, and there's something for Helen too - a present. It turns out to be the necklace that Sarah was wearing when she died. 

A ton of things happen and it did get slightly confusing in places, and there are quite a lot of people involved, but I liked the story and the setting. I thought it had a good ending, too. I'm giving it four out of five. 

The Cloisters by Katy Hays - Review

I bought this book earlier in the year I think, with a Waterstones voucher I had. It was on buy one get one half price and I liked the premise of it, so I picked it up. I really DID like the blurb, but I didn't really gel with the story and it took me ages to read. I think the execution just wasn't great. 

So, Ann Stilwell is from the Walla Walla in Washington state. She has been a student at Whitman university and is trying to get into grad school, but she has had a ton of rejections. Her dad was a professor at the college but was killed when Ann was still in high school. Through him through she learnt about translating and became interested in the early Renaissance, which is now her area of study. She is desperate to get out of Walla Walla even though her mother doesn't want her to go. She has a job at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, so she rents a small studio flat and moves the entire way across the country to New York City.

However, when she arrives she is told that the man who was supposed to be her mentor has gone to Germany or something to study, so there is no job for her. But then she is saved by Patrick. He is the curator of a museum linked to the Met called The Cloisters. He is desperate for a helper and takes Ann with him. He introduces her to his underling, Rachel, who Ann sort of already knows. At the museum there is also Leo, who is a gardener. The whole place is very cloistered and very claustrophobic. Patrick brings Ann into his confidence eventually about his work. He thinks that tarot cards were used in Italy in the Renaissance which would prove that they were used earlier than has been previously thought. 

At the beginning of the book you get told there is a body, but it's not obvious who the body belongs to until the middle of the book. Ann and Rachel become close, but Rachel is really only into herself and what she wants. She's an ambitious young woman but she also has a lot of past history and Ann doesn't know whether to trust her or not. Ann discovers something that she and Rachel decide to keep from Patrick, thinking that he will steal their research and be known as the main author of anything they publish, just because he is a lot older, more established, and a man. I did agree with them on this, to be fair. 

I felt like there was just a lot of flim flam in the book. It needed cutting a lot I think. The setting is really creepy - the New York summer is incredibly hot and that claustrophobia really carries through the whole book. I liked Ann but thought she was naive. I was hoping that there would be some kind of twist at the end which made the run up to it worth it. There is a twist, but it didn't quite make it worth it for me. I'm giving this three out of five.